چانه زنی جمعی در بخش دولتی و نقش تعیین کننده بودجه

This paper considers collective bargaining in a public sector institutional setting. The model demonstrates how budget constraints and hierarchical structure affect the bargaining outcome. A trade union bargains over wage and employment either with an output-maximizing bureau or the bureau's sponsoring institution. The slope of the contract curve depends on the bargaining level because the budget constraints differ. Various assumptions are made about the timing of the sponsor's decision concerning the budget of the bureau. Local bargaining and budget determination between the wage and employment bargains can be optimal for the sponsor because it yields a low wage.

Public sector trade unions are often regarded as influential. However, despite the large body of theoretical literature on collective bargaining, few papers have considered a public sector institutional setting explicitly. This is necessary to discover and interpret differences in collective bargaining outcomes between the public and private sector. Empirical results from the US indicate lower union–nonunion wage differentials in the public sector than in the private sector (see the surveys in Ehrenberg and Schwarz, 1986 and Freeman, 1986). If public sector trade unions are as influential as their private sector counterparts, then they must extract more of other kinds of rents, such as higher employment. This paper argues that the hierarchical structure of the public sector can lead to high union employment even though the union has low bargaining power. I take into account several aspects that distinguish public and private sector labor markets. First, the decision-making environments differ. Total available income limits the production in the public sector in contrast to product demand in the private sector. Dunlop (1958) clearly describes the analogy between the market and budgetary constraints. The specification of the budget constraint is important in all public sector models with optimization, including labor market models. Strøm (1999) discusses wage bargaining in local governments, distinguishing between local financing and cash limits from the central government. With cash limits, a sponsoring institution determines the wage costs. Holmlund (1997) investigates the macroeconomic effects of trade union influence in both the public and private sectors when the public sector bureaus are constrained by cash limits. Modeling public sector wage bargaining in a cash-limit framework was introduced by Leslie (1985). With labor as the only input, cash limits imply that the bargaining parties face an elasticity of labor demand equal to one in absolute value. There is no room for bargaining over employment. The model developed in the present paper includes non-labor expenditures in order to take possible bargaining over employment into account. Babcock and Engberg (1997) include additional relevant cost elements in a model where both the employment level and the budget size are given. In their model, a union induced wage increase is financed either by reallocating money from non-labor expenditures toward wage costs, or by reducing hiring and turnover costs by hiring less productive workers. An underlying premise of the approach is that employment is less flexible than wages, a realistic characteristic for many public sector services. Changing or restructuring a public service usually requires a long preparation process, often involving political controversies. The common view for the private sector where the variation in employment is larger, however, is that employment is the more flexible variable.1 Public sector trade unions are typically important actors in public debates about the content and organization of public services. These issues are important for the employment level. It can therefore be a reasonable simplification to assume that the unions have bargaining power over employment. In addition, recent evidence from aggregate data supports this assumption (see Alogoskoufis and Manning, 1991 and de la Croix et al., 1996). However, the union influence over employment differs from the influence over wages. In contrast to the employment determination, wage bargaining is formalized to occur with given time intervals. In the sequential bargaining framework introduced by Manning, 1987a and Manning, 1987b, bargaining over the wage and employment take place at different times and in different environments (see also Pencavel, 1991). Collective bargaining is a two-stage process. I assume throughout the paper that the employment decision is made prior to the wage decision, and that the bargaining parties have different relative bargaining powers in the wage and employment bargains. One special case of the model is that the union has no bargaining power over employment. The widely used efficient bargaining model, simultaneous bargaining over the wage and employment, is another special case of the model. The efficient bargaining model is discussed by Inman (1981) in a public sector context, and for example, McDonald and Solow (1981) in a private sector context. I show that the tradeoff between the wage and employment along the contract curve is less favorable for public sector unions than for private sector unions. Lastly, a hierarchical structure is more pronounced in the public sector than in the private sector, presumably because the public sector is a large employer. OECD (1994) describes the wage determination systems for the national public administrations and argues that countries with a single central bargain have better budgetary control than countries with more decentralized bargaining. One possible explanation is that if “collective bargaining is to be in good faith, then there is necessarily some unpredictability in the final budgetary consequences” (OECD, 1994, p. 17).2 Smaller budgetary control with local bargaining implies that the government sets the final budget after the wage determination. Compared to a situation without union influence, the local level can more easily come into a leader position in the budgetary game when unions have bargaining power. The result of union influence can therefore be high employment even though there is a low union–nonunion wage mark-up. For the local public sector in the US, Freeman (1986) and Zax and Ichniowski (1988) among others, report a positive relationship between the employment level and the occurrence of union bargaining. While these authors argue that labor demand increases because of union political influence, the present paper argues that the explanation can be different budgetary processes. In contrast to the findings in OECD (1994), however, the intention of governments introducing decentralized bargaining has been to set local budgets prior to local bargains. But is commitment to a given budget credible? For the US, Derber (1988) describes large variation across state and local governments in budgetary processes relevant for collective bargaining. In the first attempt to practice cash limits in Sweden, the budget was adjusted upwards after the wage bargaining because the wage increased much more than the initial growth in the budget (see Holmlund, 1997). Since 1993, however, there has been a system of fixed nominal expenditures for wage costs and non-labor expenditures. These facts demonstrate that an analysis of public sector collective bargaining requires a discussion of different bargaining institutions. Thus, this paper compares the outcomes under different regimes, and thereby may indicate which institutional settings that are most likely to occur in different decision-making environments. However, this can only give a partial answer to the question of why institutions vary. In my view, the new literature on political strength may contribute to the understanding of institutional variation. Empirical evidence indicates that public deficits and public spending are negatively related to the strength of the political leadership. Several possible explanations are given in the literature. Political management in coalition governments may involve several difficulties (Roubini and Sachs, 1989), strong political parties and presidents may prevent universalistic behavior of legislators (Inman and Fitts, 1990), and a unified parliament may have an advantage in handling interest group pressure Falch and Rattsø, 1997 and Falch and Rattsø, 1999. In addition, political strength may influence the possibility to make credible budgetary commitments. Hard budget constraints are more likely under strong political leaderships than under weak political leaderships. Thus, the type of government may influence the bargaining institution at the local level, and a successful decentralization of collective bargaining may require a political leadership that is sufficiently strong to withstand pressure for increased budgets.3 Section 2 presents the structure of the model and an overview of the bargaining regimes discussed. In the model, a sponsoring institution determines the budget of a bureau employing unionized workers. The employees' union bargains either with the leadership of the bureau or directly with the sponsor. I term this local and central bargaining, respectively. Section 3 makes three different assumptions about the sequence of events under local bargaining. Central bargaining is discussed in Section 4, while Section 5 compares the utility levels of the sponsor and the union across the cases discussed. The ordering of the regimes based on utility levels depends on the parameter values in the model. A small numerical example illustrates the role of the most important parameters. Section 6 provides some concluding comments.

This paper suggests that simply applying the results from union bargaining models developed for private firms when analyzing labor market outcomes in the public sector may be misleading. Budget constraints and budgetary processes are important factors of collective bargaining in the public sector. In organizations with a hierarchical structure, union influence can put the local level in a leader position in the sense that the sponsor determines the local budget after local decisions. This is a favorable position for the union. The analysis shows that union influence therefore can lead to both a high wage and a high employment level even in the case of a negatively sloped contract curve. The degree of decentralization of collective bargaining differs across countries. Two relevant factors for decisions over bargaining level follows from the model in this paper. Consider the arguments for local bargaining from the sponsor's point of view. If union bargaining power over the wage is relatively high compared to union bargaining power over employment, local bargaining yields a relatively low wage. In addition, if the possibility for the sponsor to commit to a given budget is higher with local bargaining, then this also makes local bargaining more attractive for the sponsor. When the union utility is weighted towards wages, the sponsor prefers an institutional setting that gives little room for wage increases. This is the case when the budget decision splits local bargains over the wage and employment. The model assumes stable and well-defined utility functions for the well-informed public sector decision-makers. While this highlights important differences between collective bargaining in the public and private sectors, it rules out the role of politics and uncertainty. To assess more precisely the public sector labor markets, collective bargaining models should in the future be merged with public choice models and principal-agent models. Hopefully, such models could give further insight into factors that are important for the determination of collective bargaining institutions.